Brazil Contacted an Isolated Tribe for the First Time in Two Decades

For the first time in nearly 20 years, the Brazilian government has made contact with a previously isolated indigenous tribe after the group was likely forced to take refuge from illegal logging in the Amazon rainforest.

According to FUNAI, Brazil's indigenous affairs department, the contact was made last weekend near the Peru-Brazil border after the group approached a settlement. It's the first time the Brazilian government has has extensive interactions with a previously uncontacted tribe since 1996. The group is believed to have been pushed there by illegal logging in Peru and comes just days after FUNAI warned of "imminent death and tragedy" if the logging didn't stop.

The group has no name known outside of the tribe, and it's unclear what language its people speak, Kayla Wieche, a spokesperson for Survival International, a London-based group that fights for indigenous rights worldwide, told me.

"There is no name for the group. We can't be sure how the refer to themselves or even what language they speak," she said. "It's difficult to know how many people are in the group in total and how many made contact. One FUNAI official has mentioned a figure of 70, but nobody can really be sure at the moment."

The contact was somewhat expected, because in recent weeks, Brazil's Ashaninka people, a contacted tribe living near this group, reported many more sightings of the group. Sunday, a large group of them apparently approached the Ashaninka village.

The group is believed to be the same one that was photographed from the air in both 2008 and 2010, though officials don't know for sure yet. In those photos, men can be seen pointing spears and arrows at a helicopter. Back in 2008, a widely-circulated rumor suggested that the photos were somehow a hoax, a claim that originated at The Observer. That paper has since apologized, retracted its article, and deleted it off its website.

FUNAI says the increased sightings started June 13, and contact occurred on June 29.

This is, of course, not good news. The general consensus is that uncontacted tribes should be left alone in the forest, where many of them have lived for hundreds of years or more.

A recent study suggested that many uncontacted tribes die out almost immediately after they are contacted. Of the 238 tribes that have been contacted over the past several decades, three fourths have died out. The ones that have survived see mortality rates of up to 80 percent due to contracting diseases they've never been exposed to, among other things.

FUNAI "has the premise of no contact, respecting the self-determination of peoples and doing the work of territorial protection with the presence of these people," the group said in a press release about the contact. It added that it has sent experts in indigenous health and interpreters to do their best to communicate with the uncontacted people and to keep them safe.

Back in 2011, WikiLeaks released documents that showed as much as 90 percent of Peru's mahogany exports were illegally logged from the Amazon, much of that in the region where these people lived. Survival International believes that illegal logging was to blame for pushing the tribe into Brazil, where they eventually bumped up against the contacted tribe. It's the same thing that experts fear could happen in Ecuador, where oil drilling is boxing in an uncontacted tribe and pushing them toward contacted ones.

What happens from here is anyone's guess, according to Sarah Shenker, a campaigner with Survival International who has been in close contact with people on the ground in Brazil. The group will be given the choice about whether or not it wants to settle in a village associated with outside society. There have been instances of a group being contacted and eventually electing to return to live in isolation.

She says Brazilian officials believe that in order for an uncontacted group to approach a settlement like this, external pressures must have been involved.

"It seems there were real pressures on them—logging and drug trafficking forcing them to do this," she told me. "It seems like something big has happened, for them to approach a village like this. Maybe they saw loggers and felt they had no where left to go."